


Porcelain Promises - Alex Gaskarth

by orphan_account



Category: All Time Low
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Death, F/M, Suicide, put up or shut up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 10:31:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7264369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex and Bethany are brought together when kindergarten meets high school at Jack Baradork's latest teen 'rager'. One not so simple promise could change Mr Gaskarth's life forever.<br/>Written entirely in Alex's POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1.

Acting as old as I am supposed to be is breathtakingly difficult. It isn’t difficult in the sense that I’m lacking so much maturity that my mind set is that of a twelve-year-old, or that I want to believe that I’m still seventeen years old so I drink like my kidneys still work, or even that I might be trying to ‘preserve my youth’. It’s more that she isn’t there to hold me together or keep me sane. She isn’t there to hold my hand in ridiculous situations in which I should be holding hers, because she had always been the brave one. She wouldn’t have been the one to sit here every Saturday night, willing herself to catch some sort of influenza strong enough to kill her, hoping the rain would just wash her away. Or would she? Everything was a mess. Everything is a mess. Is that what she’d done? All that time? I don’t know. I don’t know what she’d done, or why she’d done it, or what I did to deserve what I do, or why I sit here every single Saturday night that I am in Baltimore and choke up all of these ridiculous feelings, these memories that don’t… They don’t make sense. Nothing makes sense and I have no idea what is wrong with me, or what was wrong with her, or what is wrong with the world, except that everything is wrong. I’m not really sure that I’ll ever actually know. But she did. But she does. She knows. Bethany St Claire knows. Or Bethany St Claire knew. Because where is Bethany St Claire, now? 

Wait.  
   
We met in the most ridiculous way possible, in silly little groups of teenage boys and teenage girls, with a silly little green glass bottle smuggled from someone's father's liquor cabinet. "This, boys and girls, is Porcelain Promises." I'd never actually understood the title of this game, considering the bottle was made out of glass, but Jack Barakat continued to spew the rules like a drunken rabbit on stilts. He liked to talk like he was older than all of us, but he was actually the youngest here and, therefore, the most illegal. He was also, by far, the most drunk. "I am going to place the bottle in the middle of the room. One by one-"  
"Isn't this just spin the bottle?" Jack pointedly rolled his eyes and forced a scowl, because he wasn't capable of pulling angry faces, genuinely, without looking like a constipated bird. "If you'd let me finish, you'd know." His unbearably (unaffected by puberty) high toned voice forced a few giggles out of surrounding girls who thought it was 'cute', or maybe just embarrassing (my guess was that it was just embarrassing, considering the poor lanky little boy had never had a girlfriend). "One by one, each of us will spin the bottle." The boy who had asked his previous question nudged a couple of his friends and snorted. He'd all but called him stupid. Only I got to insult Jack like that. "Whoever it lands on is your Porcelain Promise. You have five minutes in the closet under the stairs to tell each other a secret or make a promise each, and then you will re-join the circle. Understood?" He earned himself a couple of nods, but at least a quarter of the kids just stood up and blatantly walked away; sadly, I couldn't blame them. What kind of high school party solely consisted of pass the parcel and story time?  
   
The few sorry souls that Jack had gotten too drunk to escape stayed to play the game, and the bottle spun and spun until it felt sick (wait, no, that was Mindy from homeroom), and then, all of a sudden, it was my turn the spin the bottle. I didn't know what I was supposed to expect but when my fingers touched the cold green glass, I panicked a little. It was only spin the bottle, like that half-drunk kid had said - no, it was Porcelain Promises. I did not have a promise. I didn’t even now most of the kids here – how was I supposed to make them some sort of promise? It was too late for charm, wit and sarcasm. I nudged the bottle in a pathetic gesture to make it move against the carpet, but friction had been plotting against me all night. Thanks physics. "Come on man, give it some American strength!" I'm not American. I nudged it a little harder and hoped for the best; go big or go home, right? I wanted to go home. "Bethany St Claire, Alex Gaskarth, your closet awaits!" Jack was overly grande with his movements, as if he were on Beverly Hills 90210 or Degrassi, making me wish I'd genuinely gone home when those others did during his beautiful Jacksplanation of the rules.  
   
Stumbling into the dimly lit closet, I realised that I'd never really stopped to take a proper look at Bethany St Claire. Who was she? No one really knew. Why? Bethany St Claire dressed like her mother had breast fed her while smoking some sort of illegal marijuana, after giving birth high on crystal meth to keep away the pain. She always wore these strange beige-brown skirts that landed at her calves and her shirts always had some sort of rips or cuts in the bottom; it looked like she'd cut up half of her clothes with a sharp rock she'd found in her garden one day. The sad part was that it worked. She didn't look strange or out of place or whimsically disarranged until you put her next to a typically dressed fifteen-year-old girl in the middle of 2002. "You're Bethany St Claire," I told her, contemplating how such a fantastically over-dressed girl could pull off such a fantastically under-dressed name. "You are Alex Gaskarth." Her voice was somewhat alien to me; she sounded normal and American, and not in that terrible whiney Paris Hilton kind of way way, and she didn’t sound any different to what I expected. What had I expected? I’d never heard Bethany St Claire talk before. "Is that a promise?" Bethany shook her head. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was supposed to mean. I was Alex Gaskarth, I am Alex Gaskarth, and no promise could have rung truer than that.  
   
"I don't know who you are," Bethany told me, after at least 30 seconds of staring into space. I half expected her to start lashing out, how confused people do when they don’t know where they are or who they’re with.  I gave her a quizzical look. She knew who I was. My best friend had just announced to the entire room exactly who I was. "How can I know who you are when I don't know who I am? I do not know who you are. That, Alex Gaskarth, is my promise." She looked far too happy to be saying what she was saying. I took one singular step forwards, in a challenge, a little too drunk to fully know what was actually going on. "Would you like to know me?" Bethany's eyes remained distant, untouched. The plastic flowers, not so perfectly braided into her hair, didn't match the rest of her clothes (did any of her clothes match, though?), but they matched her glassy eyes pretty well in the manner that they were manufactured. "I might. It's lonely being friendless, sometimes."  
"Well then, Bethany St Claire, you will never be alone again. That is my promise."   
   
And I’d meant it at the time. I had fully and totally and completely meant it and, re-joining the story time circle, I'd never felt less like a fifteen-year-old boy, and not in the way that I felt three because Jack had put us in a story time circle. It was more the fact that that singular conversation was probably the most sophisticated conversation I had ever been a part of (or that ‘that that’ makes sense in the English language), while all of my friends were off eating little chunks of cheese from shot glasses that we weren’t supposed to be touching. And all I had was a story time circle and a strange little girl named Bethany St Claire to keep me company.

I think we're onto something.


	2. 2.

Choking on myself, head in the toilet bowl, legs numb from kneeling, I wondered how Jack could possibly have been sleeping soundly in his bed as if he hadn’t drunk a dangerous volume of alcohol. It wasn’t as if his ‘body mass’ could actually support any of it – it was supposed to have him paralytic within minutes but, once again, Jack Baradick had unknowingly defied science. I’d already taken double the recommended amount of aspirin pills (I’d decided to leave all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges to Jack in case of my death under these circumstances), but I somehow still looked like Death himself had fucked me through my urethra… with a blunt butter knife. How was I the only one being forced to ensue in terribly painful pillow talk with Death? And on the bathroom floor, with no actual pillows? And the worst part was, it was 3am on a Monday morning.  
   
If Death had taught me anything that morning, it was that empty pillow talk wouldn’t help me with my late algebra homework. “I don’t know what x means,” I groaned, shaking my head, hands threaded into my hair. My hangover hadn’t subsided in any way and the dark circles under my eyes definitely showed it, earning me the nickname ‘Panda’ for at least an hour. Jack didn’t even try to help me in my evident time of need but, instead, twirled a cheap pen between his thumb and fore-finger. He was probably waiting for it to explode on me, as if it could make my day any worse. It couldn’t. “You do know what x means.”  
“No I don’t!” Pain surged through my head like ripples in water where someone had dropped some sort of stone. Like the great friend that he is, Jack laughed at me as I laid my head in my hands, wishing Rian were here to make him shut up; his parents thought his hangover was some kind of sickness bug and had allowed the 'poor' bastard to spend the day comfortably laying in bed, full of painkillers and water. “Do it for me, Jack.”  
“I’m hungover.” Spraying me with spit through his teeth, Jack bit his bottom lip and stifled a laugh.  
“No you’re fucking not.” I sincerely hoped that it would be Jack to endure urethra bathroom sex with Death’s butter knife penis the next time we decided to throw a party on a school night.

I didn't sit with Jack in study hall that day - I sat with Bethany St Claire. The look that Jack shot me from across the room was heartbreakingly, murderously disappointed. 'What do you mean you want to sit with hippie chick from 1992?' his face asked. As if it was going to prevent him from messaging Rian and Zack the second he got home, I smiled minutely and shrugged my shoulders, making an attempt to ignore that pain that it caused me. "You look quite pained," Bethany told me, while I was paying too much attention to Jack and his disappointment to be paying enough to her. "I am quite pained." This was quite possibly the most formal sentence my mouth had every constructed, but she didn't need to know that. I emptied my bag of my algebra text book and three sheets of squared paper; this homework wasn't going to do itself, even with the most whimsical girl for miles sitting directly in front of it. Her magic wasn't real magic. "Next time, take some pills and drink a glass of water before you go to sleep. You won't have a headache in the morning." It took me a lot longer than it should have done to realise that she meant 'next time you go out and unnecessarily get drunk on a school night and make ridiculous promises to ridiculous girls' (except maybe not that last part), but she didn't need to know that either so I simply responded with, "I'll keep that in mind. Jack never gets hungover."  
   
Unfortunately for Jack, over the years, he's accumulated a strong affinity for hangovers. He (for some reason unbeknownst to me) bought himself a club/bar and has a habit of drinking through his profits and waking up naked in a cardboard box out back; it's safe to say that he probably regrets every decision he's made thus far. I can't say that I ever saw Bethany hungover, but I wish I had.

It sounds mean, saying that I wish that I'd had the chance to watch my friend sprawled across the toilet bowl, feet flimsily tucked beneath her on the cold tiled floor, vomit landing everywhere but the actual toilet bowl. I don't want to have seen her suffer (though I do regret to admit that I did have to see her suffer), but it would be comforting to know that such perfect objects of being felt some sort of pain. Don't get me wrong, Bethany St Claire felt pain; Bethany St Claire felt far too much pain for a small little fifteen year old girl who was too delicate to effectively open a fire door by herself. But she didn't feel the kind of pain that Jack and I felt and Rian and Zack avoided eight times out of ten.

We can't run from fate.

"Neither do I," She told me, glassy eyes glittering ever so slightly. I thought they were blue but they looked kind of green next to plastic sunflowers. At that moment in time, I was a little lost at the concept that someone so tiny didn't get hungover after attending 'raging parties' (drunken kindergarten games) hosted by the one and only Jack Baralcohol, but I'd soon discover that she was, in fact, telling the truth. "Hey, do you know what x means?"

She did.

But we can let it take us down.


End file.
